Kate Spade, 55, has died of apparent suicide, the Associated Press reported Tuesday. The New York fashion designer apparently hanged herself with a scarf, and was found by her housekeeping staff in her Manhattan apartment at 10:20 A.M., The Hollywood Reporter adds; she left a note.

Spade leaves behind a design legacy that included over 140 retail shops and outlet stores and more than 175 stores internationally, in addition to the iconic handbags that launched her career in 1993. She built this legacy from the ground; she and husband Andy Spade, brother of actor David Spade, worked on the earliest handbag designs from their Tribeca loft.

As Vanity Fair noted in its May 2002 profile of the Spades, Kate and Andy were often compared to Nick and Nora Charles of The Thin Man, because of the obvious way they delighted in each other. Kate, who was born Kate Brosnahan in Kansas City, Missouri, and Andy, from Birmingham, Michigan, met at college at Arizona State University. They move to New York shortly after college.

Once she was in New York, Kate got a temp job at Mademoiselle magazine, where she was later the senior fashion editor in charge of accessories for five years. It was this work at the magazine, Vanity Fair’s Laura Jacobs wrote, that gave her the knowledge she needed to start designing the bag that she didn’t have but wished she did—”a good-natured, ladylike, with echoes of Mom’s mid-century, short-handled bag.” It debuted at Barneys in 1993, but it was in the mid-1990s Kate Spade really started to be seen as a competitor of other, non-American bag designers.

Video: How Does Kate Spade Empower Women to Transform . . .

As she told The Boston Globe in 1999, she carried a no-name rectangular wicker bag instead of a designer handbag before she began making her own. “I was looking for something that could be less serious. More personal. I also wanted timelessness.”

Before long, Spade’s work became recognizable just about anywhere.

“The purses became something of a handshake,” Wall Street Journal fashion reporter Christina Binkley told Racked in 2016. “When two women met and saw they were both holding Kate Spade bags, they’d nod at each other and understand they were on the same page. It was very chic.”

Kate and Andy Spade sold their shares in the Kate Spade company in 2006, and in 2016 launched the line Frances Valentine—Kate Spade even changed her name to Kate Valentine to honor the new line. She is survived by her husband and 13-year-old daughter, Frances.

This is a developing story.

Get Vanity Fair’s Cocktail Hour

Our essential brief on culture, the news, and more. And it's on the house.